Corporate and legal

Boxing's popularity seems to have been overtaken by such pleasures as mixed martial arts and American Idol over the last few years. This doesn't seem to have discouraged Facebook users from forming groups around their love of expressing hate for certain boxers.

According to the Telegraph, WBA World light-welterweight champion Amir Khan, a Briton of Pakistani heritage, has decided to threaten the social-networking company with legal action over some of these Facebook groups.

Together with his manager, Frank Warren, Khan has employed legal counsel after so far failing to persuade Facebook to take down so-called hate groups aimed … Read more

The European Commission's decision to further probe Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems has raised both questions and speculation.

Oracle said in April that it would acquire Sun, a server maker and software company whose assets include the open-source MySQL database. The deal has been approved by the U.S. Justice Department and by Sun's shareholders.

But the European Commission, the regulatory arm of the European Union, announced last week that it was opening an in-depth investigation into the $7.4 billion planned takeover, saying that a preliminary probe raised the specter of threats to competition in the … Read more

IT spending may be tight, but chief information officers plan to increase their budget allocation to a select group of virtualization vendors, including VMware, Citrix, and Red Hat, according to a Goldman Sachs CIO survey released Monday.

It's not surprising that virtualization is top of mind and wallet for CIOs, but things look particularly rosy for Red Hat, given its position as the market leader in open source and a strong challenger in virtualization.

While the percentage of CIOs expecting to increase IT spending has grown since Goldman Sachs' last survey in June 2009, a full 69 percent expect … Read more

Oracle has much to say to Sun Microsystems customers in a front-page advertisement it placed in Thursday's European edition of The Wall Street Journal.

The advertisement commits to greater investments in Sun hardware and Solaris software, but has absolutely nothing to say about MySQL. Is this a necessary omission to appease European regulators, or is it a sign of Oracle's intentions?

In the advertisement, Oracle commits to the following:

IBM, which has been cleaning up at Sun's expense, gets a warning from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison: "We're in it to win it. IBM, we're … Read more

The Symbian Foundation and China Mobile have joined forces to promote the development of Symbian-based software for the Chinese operator's app store.

The partners will also promote the uptake of TD-SCDMA, the 3G standard developed in China as an alternative to WCDMA and other wireless interface technology. The collaboration agreement was announced Wednesday.

"The Symbian platform holds a strong position in China's mobile market, and we welcome the opportunity to build our relationship with the Symbian Foundation," Lu Xiang Dong, a vice president at China Mobile, said in a statement.

China Mobile, which is China's … Read more

The long-awaited flood of Google Android devices is about to hit the market, which should help bring more cool applications to new Android phones.

Motorola will be the next big manufacturer to announce its Android phone. The company plans to formally unveil it at an event on Thursday in San Francisco. Motorola has already been reaching out to developers to get them on board to create new applications that it hopes will drive demand for the new phones.

Mobile applications for smartphones are hot. The fact that Apple's App Store has had more than 1 billion downloads after only … Read more

The National Hockey League franchise Dallas Stars announced on Wednesday that it has partly ditched standard ticket pricing in favor of a dynamic pricing model. Software developer Qcue plans to provide the technology the team needs to adjust prices.

The Dallas Stars have inked a one-year deal with Qcue for it to analyze several factors to determine the right price for each home game. The Stars want to ensure that as many people as possible are attending the team's games. The changes will affect only individual game tickets in the upper level. Season ticket holders and those in the lower level will pay a standard rate for all games.

According to Geoff Moore, Dallas Stars senior vice president of sales and marketing, Qcue's technology analyzes the Stars and its opponents' win-loss records, attendance, stats, opposing players, and more. Standings, supply of tickets left, and attendance also play a part. Combine all those factors (and more), and Qcue's proprietary algorithm spits out the suggested pricing on each seat.

In order to make the pricing as effective as possible, the Stars have decided that the team will sell tickets in two-month blocks only. The first block, for games in October and November, will be offered on September 12.

As the season progresses, Qcue will continue to tweak its algorithm while adding as much data as possible to the software. Ticket prices will change based on last year's information, as well as this season's performance. Moore believes that selling tickets through Qcue's service is the best way for the Stars to achieve its financial goals.

"Our goal is to increase the number of ticket-buying customers we have," Moore said. "We believe that Qcue's software will increase our revenue, but it's likely that the number of bodies in seats will increase at a much more rapid rate. That's exactly what we want."… Read more

Update, 11:10 a.m. PST: Added response from Microsoft.

I4i said Wednesday that it refutes the latest claims made by Microsoft in an XML patent infringement case involving Word.

I4i Chairman Loudon Owen called Microsoft's claims "the same weak defenses Microsoft repackaged from the trial and raised on appeal."

Following its recent appeal, Microsoft was granted a stay of an injunction last week that would have forced the company to stop selling Word in its current form by next month.

In its appeal, Microsoft criticized the district court that ordered it to stop selling Word, claiming … Read more

Yahoo announced three new mobile applications Tuesday as the company continues to focus more on developing specific applications for the iPhone and other select smartphones like the BlackBerry.

The most widely publicized application to be announced Tuesday is Flickr for Mobile. This application is only available for Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch. It's free from the iTunes App Store. And it allows users to upload, share, and tag photos and videos. Flickr already has a browser-based mobile app at M.flickr.com.

Yahoo also created two new mobile applications for a few BlackBerry models.

Yahoo Finance for Mobile … Read more